


they danced by the light of the moon

by besidemethewholedamntime



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: 6+1 Things, Academy Era through to Post Series, Canon Compliant, F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Mild Angst, Slow Dancing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-20 15:34:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30007047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/besidemethewholedamntime/pseuds/besidemethewholedamntime
Summary: "Their first dance is at the Academy.It’s not really dancing, per se. It could be dancing, it should be dancing, but what they are doing is most definitely not. Jemma is rigid, attempting to execute the steps as though they were the steps of a mathematical equation and not a waltz. Fitz is loose-limbed, gangly, and his attempts to pass his partner forward in the progressives look more as though he is attempting to send her into orbit."Six times that Fitzsimmons try to slow dance, and the one time that they manage to get it right.
Relationships: Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons
Comments: 10
Kudos: 51





	they danced by the light of the moon

**Author's Note:**

> It's finally finished! Oh my goodness how this has snowballed. It was originally only going to be two things, but then I had more ideas, and then it didn't manage to become an actual '5+1' because there's an extra one that I just had to include and yeah... It's been stressful but it's all my fault because I'm such a sucker for slow dancing and I just wanted to get it right. 
> 
> This is entirely the product of The X-Files episode 'The Post-Modern Prometheus', my 3.5 hour train journeys to uni, and the song 'Dance With Me' by Phillip Phillips. It's mostly the last one, but the other two did play a small part also.
> 
> Also full disclaimer the timeline in this might not fit exactly because I can't quite remember certain parts but it's all good right ;)
> 
> Title from 'The Owl and the Pussy-Cat' by Edward Lear. Song 'Dance With Me' by Phillip Phillips which I wholeheartedly recommend you listen to while reading, or just in general :) 
> 
> I hope you enjoy!

_And with every single heartbeat I have left  
I'll make it known you are my world and nothing less_

_\- 'Dance With Me', Phillip Phillips_

**1.**

Their first dance is at the Academy.

It’s not really dancing, per se. It could be dancing, it should be dancing, but what they are doing is most definitely not. Jemma is rigid, attempting to execute the steps as though they were the steps of a mathematical equation and not a waltz. Fitz is loose-limbed, gangly, and his attempts to pass his partner forward in the progressives look more as though he is attempting to send her into orbit.

Their instructor, already frustrated at trying to corral the mixed group of cadets into learning this skill for the upcoming ball amidst waves of protestation, pairs them together in the hope that they’ll balance each other out. _You should never have been apart,_ is what he grumbles as he walks off. _Only bad things happen._

It seems bad things can happen when they are together, also. Psychic connection they may have, but apparently it doesn’t extend to the dancefloor. Jemma grips too tightly to Fitz’s arm and leaves the marks of her fingernails behind. Fitz’s attempts to spin her leave her arm almost ripped from its socket.

“How can you be so bad at this?” She hisses, after one particularly violent twirl. “It’s practically just physics.”

“Oh well excuse me,” he blusters, trying not to think about them being the closest they’ve ever been in the six months they’ve known each other. He glares at the nails in his bicep instead. “You’re the one that’s trying to steer me about the place like I’m a bloody car, Simmons. I’m a _person._ ”

“Well if you could keep control of your limbs then I wouldn’t have to steer you, would I?” And she digs her nails in tighter.

“ _Me?_ ” Fitz whispers furiously. “You’re seriously blaming _me_?”

“Yes,” Jemma says staunchly. “I am.”

After ten minutes of their flailing, the instructor halts the music. _Fitzsimmons! Go sit this one out before either of you get seriously hurt. We’ll figure out something for the two of you later,_ he shouts, and they slink off like the disgraced children that they are, under no illusions that their youth, as opposed to their genius, is what has saved them this time.

When the music starts once more and everyone begins again, Fitz has to concede that it was probably for the best, and his cheeks become retroactively red at what everyone must have thought of them. Jemma seethes beside him, arms folded over her chest in indignation.

“Well, we could have done that. We weren’t _that_ terrible.”

“We were. We were _awful_.”

“A bit more practice and we could have gotten it.” She turns to him with bright, expectant eyes. “Don’t you think?”

No, actually, he doesn’t. It’s not what he’s thinking at all. He’s thinking about how it felt to hold her in a way he’s never held anyone before. They’re seventeen and she’s his best friend and of course he loves her but it’s always just been a love of the one kind so far. He’s never considered there could be another. He’s thinking of how overwhelmed by it he was, how big it was, how it felt like a burden. He’s thinking of how being sent off feels like a reprieve, and how thankful he is that he can now come back to his rightful place by her side and not have to worry about it anymore.

But that isn’t what Jemma wants to hear, and after almost spinning her straight into the brick wall earlier, he feels as though he owes her, and so he just sighs, unconsciously crosses his arms in the exact position as hers, and says, “Sure, Simmons. Of course, we would.”

**2.**

“Come on, Fitz. Just try it, would you?” She bites her lip, unconsciously debating what she knows she’s going to say anyway. “For me?”

He looks at her with red, angry eyes, and she tries not to take it personally but it’s like a fist squeezing her heart just the same. She knows that, if he could, he’d launch into a spiel about how bad they were the last time they danced, about how dancing isn’t something they _do_ , and he’d bring up the unspoken agreement they came to that they would never, ever attempt it again.

But he can’t do that. That’s rather the point.

She knows she has no right to really ask him to do anything for her, not when he’s the one that shoved the oxygen into her hand and hit the button and gave her an uncertain chance at having a future. She has no right but she does anyway because she’s getting that desperate. She’s tried talking, tried listening, tried sitting across from him in a restaurant and pretending not to be hurt by the bored look on his face, the cross lines on his forehead that never used to appear when she spoke to him. Nothing has worked and, as evidenced by the fact she’s even considering this at all, she doesn’t have much left to try.

She holds out a hand and levels him with a look. It’s clear that, just as he didn’t with her, she’s not giving him a choice.

It’s a terse ten seconds in which her heart hammers underneath her shirt, threatening to jump out from beneath her fragile skin, but eventually he sighs – the one sound that comes out of his mouth perfectly intelligible – and takes her hand. Jemma tries not to jump at the contact, tries not to think about how this is the closest she’s been to him in months.

He stands, awkward and stiff, and she fits herself into him, only not quite. It’s as though they are parts of the same puzzle, but they don’t belong side by side anymore. Where once there would have been a seamless transition, no real way to tell the edges of themselves, there are now gaps, chinks in the armour, wide chasms that are seemingly impossible to cross. She swallows hard and tries not to think about these, either.

They begin to sway, soft and slow, and Jemma has to bite her lip against the fact that what should be sweet isn’t really sweet at all. It’s begrudging and it’s resentful and it takes her a moment to work out who’s feeling what. _Where is the anger really coming from, Jemma?_ The answer makes her feel sick and so to distract herself she asks him:

“Do you remember when we did this last time, at the Academy?” She feels herself blush at a decade-old memory. “That instructor was so horrified with us, wasn’t he? It was the talk of the class for weeks.”

Fitzsimmons, who could conquer the world but who couldn’t conquer a St Bernard’s Waltz. Fitzsimmons, who could once have whole conversations without even opening their mouths, who now can’t even look each other in the eye.

It would make her laugh if she wasn’t so unbearably sad.

Unable to look at him, she instead tightens her grip on his arm, wishing she could tighten her grip on _him,_ on the part of him that is sliding away from her. “Remember, Fitz?” She asks, not even disguising the desperation in her voice. “Remember that?”

She hears him huff, his chest rising and falling against hers. For nine whole days she felt it rise and fall beneath her cheek, as she dreaded the moment that it wouldn’t do so anymore. She would know the sensation of it anywhere. This long moment now feels a lot like those days had back then.

“No,” he says eventually, and it feels like he’s choosing a side. His voice is quiet as he delivers his blow. “I don’t.”

She has an urge to scream into his skin until she shatters but of course she doesn’t. Instead, she presses her lips into a hard line and holds herself tightly. If she falls apart there isn’t anybody left anymore who would know what way the pieces fit back together.

“That’s alright,” she says with a smile, glad he can’t see it for it’s horribly false. Tears sting in her eyes but she refuses to let them fall. “It’s probably best you don’t. It’s not a good memory anyway.”

But it had been for her. They’d been young and silly and cared about things that seem so inconsequential now. She’d like to think he’s not being deliberately cruel, but what does it say about the state of their relationship that suddenly she’s not so sure?

He steps back a few moments later, citing tiredness and a headache, and she lets him leave without much of a fight. Without any fight at all. It feels like a betrayal when she finds herself breathing easier as he goes.

This isn’t helping either of them. They aren’t who they were and it’s time to accept that. An idea forms in her mind, and in the morning she knows she’ll work on setting it in motion. They can’t go on like this. He can’t go on like this. It’ll kill him. She didn’t drag him up from ninety-feet below to let it happen, and it won’t. Not on her watch.

Fitzsimmons, who could save the world. What a joke. Fitzsimmons couldn’t even manage to save themselves.

She presses her lips together again to stop herself from crying out. No matter how homesick she might be for the past, she can’t have it back. There’s nowhere to go but forwards.

It’s time to move forwards then. To actually move. It’s time to do what she should have done weeks before now. Rip off the plaster and let it fall to the floor. Pretend you don’t notice you’re bleeding and hope it stops on its own.

It’s time to do the unthinkable. It’s time to let them go.

**3.**

They stumble into their bedroom holding hands, with their cheeks aching from smiling and their lips sticky from the cheap cake that Deke had managed to find on his travels. The man’s been resourceful today, and whilst Fitz can’t really pretend to like him, he must begrudgingly admit that he’s done a good job. The rings are beautiful, Jemma’s dress is stunning, and, best of all, he hadn’t even thought to look for a kilt.

Of course there had been the Zima, which definitely wouldn’t have been Fitz’s first choice, however, it’s responsible for gifting him tipsy Jemma and so he’s thankful, even if he can’t quite understand it. As far as he’d seen, she had drank three at most, and not even because she had enjoyed them, but because it was their wedding and because it was better than nothing.

(But then again things like this have been happening to him lately, haven’t they? Little snatches of time missing here and there. Sometimes he walks out of a room and finds he can’t remember walking into it)

“I haven’t drank in such a long time,” she sighs, answering his unspoken question. “It’s been ages since we’ve drank together, Fitz. It was nice to do it again.”

“So that’s the reason for the big smile on your face?” He teases. “Nothing to do with a certain event that happened earlier?”

“I _suppose_ ,” she says ruefully, and then she smiles as widely as she has all day and he feels his heart stop in his chest as it has all day. It hits him, not for the first time, how much he loves her, and how much he really doesn’t deserve her loving him.

“Oh, Fitz,” she says, breathless. “Let’s dance!”

“Jemma,” he half-groans. “We don’t dance. We can’t dance.”

“But it’s our _wedding_ ,” she pouts. “We’re _married._ We have to dance for that.” She bites her lip and how is he to resist that? “There’s nobody here to see us. Come _on._ ”

She had him before she even asked, because this day, a day that he married Jemma Anne Simmons in a false forest with rings and a suit bought for him by a straggler from the future, is a day where truly anything can happen, and she knows it. Grinning, she loops her arms around his neck and presses herself close to him and he knows that if he kissed her now, at this exact moment, she would taste like sugar and a whole lot of love.

There’s no music, and Jemma attempts to hum but gets the giggles ten seconds in and abandons it. It’s fine. They don’t need it. They don’t even need to dance, really. They just need to be here, together, so close that the air has to fight for space between them. The world is ending and they’re not-quite dancing and he would laugh but the messy perfection of it all makes sense. How else could it really have been?

At some point their heads come to rest on each other’s shoulders and their not-quite dancing has become something even less than that. A gentle shuffle that reminds him of being on a boat. He’d sail to the end of the world with her. A part of him can’t believe he hasn’t already.

“I missed you,” Jemma whispers into the skin at his neck. “I missed you so much.”

“You don’t have to anymore,” he whispers back into her own. “I’m here.” His arms tighten around her. “I’m right here.”

She pulls back and looks him in the eye and for a second she’s no longer tipsy, no longer soft. Her eyes have perfect clarity. “Are you?”

And then before he can even work out what she means, what it is that changed so suddenly in her face, her head is back on his shoulder and she’s holding him tightly, as though she may never let him go. It is as though it has never happened, and for the rest of his life he’ll wonder if it really did.

She sighs, softly and sweetly, and he feels himself unwind. They are _married._ Of all the impossible things…

“You’re my heart, Fitz,” she says, her voice a vibration, a hum. “And you deserve it.”

He swallows past a lump that hasn’t really gone away since the day he met her. “I love you,” he whispers. “And I know.”

There’s a voice in his head as of late that whispers to him otherwise, but, for tonight at least, it is silent.

**4.**

A year later and it’s him but it’s not him and when she asks him to dance after the little party, he questions it just as she hoped he would.

“We can’t dance, Jemma,” he says with a frown. “We don’t dance.”

“Yes,” she says firmly, clinging to him. “We do.”

And there must be something in her eyes, her voice, because he protests no further and simply allows himself to be moved to music that isn’t there.

She has searched the galaxies for him and here he is, here they are, dancing together at the end of the world once more. She can’t tell him, will never tell him, but she just had to have this moment again. _I’ve got you,_ she says, not out loud, but in the way she presses her face into his neck, her body against his. She’d fuse their bones together if she could. _I’m never going to let you go again._

“Jemma?” He asks, pulling away. “You alright?”

His are so blue in this light. A biblical blue, as though the colour has been sent down from the heavens in this instant and stored in his eyes for safekeeping. She, Jemma Simmons, has borne witness to it, and she’s not sharing. This colour is hers and hers alone.

“Yes,” she says, and kisses him hard so he can’t ask her anymore.

It’s love, yes, but it’s also just being so bloody grateful for being alive, for being here at all. She can taste the gratitude on his tongue, is sure that he can taste it on hers/ Their dancing slows, stops, becomes a dance of the more horizontal variety and she thinks _I give you me, now and forever. When this is over, we’re going home._

**5.**

“Dance with me?”

Jemma looks up at him from where she’s standing behind their sofa, hands gripping the cushions tightly. She eyes his outstretched hand like it’s something offensive.

“Fitz,” she begins, narrowing her eyes incredulously. He thinks he’s never loved her more. “Are you _insane_?”

“Yeah,” he says simply. “Probably.”

She presses her lips together and he can see the gears turning behind her eyes. Eventually she sighs. “Why?”

“Because you’re swaying anyway,” he shrugs, and watches as she realises that she is, in fact, doing just that. “We might as well do it together.”

She looks at his still-outstretched hand, though no longer as if it’s a dead, decaying thing she can’t bear to touch (which, now that he thinks about it, is just nonsense. Jemma loves touching dead, decaying things) and instead just warily, as though there’s a secret he’s keeping about it.

“You hate dancing. It’s not something we do.”

“I think you’ll find that’s just not true,” he corrects as she takes his hand. It’s cool and soft in his own, and he is beyond thankful that some things never change.

Slowly he leads her to the centre of their ‘living room’. Her feet are in socks and she’s wearing one of his shirts and though she’s pregnant with their child, though she’s currently in early labour with their child, he sees a Jemma he knew a long time ago and thinks about how far they’ve come since the first time they held each other and danced together like this.

“I think you’ll find it is,” Jemma says as they begin to sway. “You can hardly call whatever is it we’ve done before ‘dancing’.”

“It is,” he insists. “It always was.” It’s perhaps just never been anyone’s traditional idea of dancing but that’s fine, isn’t it? Fitzsimmons, who’ve never done anything by the book.

Jemma hums and then takes a sharp breath, burying her face into his neck. He keeps rocking her gently from side to side, letting it all pass.

“Do you remember when we did this at the Academy?” She says after several heartbeats. There is a weight behind her words that he doesn’t understand. “For that ball?”

“Yeah,” he says carefully. He’s not thought about it in such a long time. “We got kicked off the floor.”

“We did,” Jemma chuckles, but there’s a relief in it that he decides not to question. “Oh it was horrible, wasn’t it? They were all looking at us as though we were idiots. Do you remember their faces? That one cadet that couldn’t stop laughing at us?”

“He was Operations and he tripped over his own shoelaces about ten minutes afterwards,” he says, grinning a little at the memory of it. “Wiped the smile right off his face.”

Jemma laughs, too. “Yes, well, hypocrisy was always one of their talents, wasn’t it?”

She can say that again. It threatens to sober the moment but he doesn’t let it. He’s gotten good at that, at doing things he never used to be able. He supposes it’s something to do with becoming a father, at his downright refusal to let his own issues affect the beauty of what’s to come. He’ll learn from the mistakes of the fathers before him. He likes to think he already has.

“It feels like such a long time ago,” Jemma murmurs. “If you’d have told me back then that we’d be here now…”

“I would have said you were mental,” he says into the soft shell of her ear and feels rather than hears her laugh into his shirt.

“Yes, that is exactly what I would have said. I certainly wouldn’t have believed you.”

“No,” he tells her, as he gently turns her around. “I wouldn’t have believed you either.”

“Isn’t it funny,” she says, “how life turns out? We were supposed to be in a lab for the rest of our days, never seeing the field at all… what a life we would have missed.”

He hums in agreement. What he would have missed indeed. Where would they be now, he wonders, if they’d never left? Who would they be? They must be there, in another world, him and Simmons, sitting together in that lab side by side. He hopes they’re happy, but he doesn’t envy their life at all.

“I’m glad you dragged us out of there, you know.”

“Really?” Jemma looks up at him, surprise in her eyes. “Even after everything?”

He nods, moves one hand from her back to the side of her bump, her skin warm through his shirt. “I’d do it all again.”

She nods and whispers, “So would I.”

She moves her head back to his shoulder and he moves his hands to her waist, encouraging her to lean on him, to let him take some of the weight while he still can. Soon things will change, soon they will have to move. These are their last moments as being who they have always been. It’s almost time to cross the event horizon once more.

But not right now, not at this moment. In this moment they can just keep on dancing, keep on swaying, and nothing else can touch them. Fitzsimmons in their own little world. After all of these years, that’s another thing that hasn’t changed.

“Fitz,” Jemma begins, her voice barely more than a vibration against his pulse. “Are you scared?”

He’d like to tell her no, pretend that he has it all in hand and that his heart isn’t inching further up his throat with every beat, but he can’t. It would feel dirty, would taint the small space between them. Besides, he won’t lie to her. She already knows.

“Yeah,” he says past his heart.

There’s a barely perceptible nod. “Me too.”

There are any number of things that could be said, that should be said, but that neither of them will. It doesn’t matter. All the best things remain unspoken anyway. So for now they just hold each other tightly, turn each other around in the small space of their Zephyr living room as it flies on throughout the stars, as though nothing matters except being here, together, in this moment.

As though everything will be alright, if only they just keep on dancing.

**6.**

“You’re alright,” Jemma soothes, kissing Alya’s feverish forehead from where it’s nestled against her neck. She sways softly from side to side, backwards and forwards. The movement has soothed Alya ever since she was a baby. Their daughter, even when still she is not, always preferring to be in motion. In most of the photos they have of her, she is a blur. “You’re going to be fine.”

“It hurts though,” Alya sniffles. “It _really_ hurts.”

Jemma sighs, gently hiking their daughter further up her hip. At six years old she’s getting a bit too heavy to be in this position for too long, but for the sake of skinned knees and grazed palms, Jemma knows she’ll manage to power through.

“I know, sweet girl. I know. Try not to think about it, hm? Try to think of lovely things instead.”

“Like fish?” Alya suggests. “And ice-cream?”

“Yes, like fish and ice-cream.”

“Can-” she stops, sniffs once more, making sure her mother hears it. “Can I maybe have some ice-cream?”

Jemma tries not to laugh, knowing her daughter would take offence at her mother’s ability to laugh so soon after her tragic (and yet spectacular) fall from the swing. “You’re so like your father,” she says instead. “But I suppose, yes, you can have some ice-cream.”

“Okay,” Alya says mournfully, but the sniffles are no longer quite as deep. “Chocolate ice-cream?”

Oh she’s definitely like her father. They have a smart one on their hands, that’s for certain. Of course it was never really in doubt.

“It’s that’s what you would like,” Jemma confirms. “Let’s wait for Daddy to get home first though, yeah?”

“How’s the patient?” Fitz asks, walking into the room with a carrier bag on his arm. Speak of the Devil. Jemma hadn’t even heard him come in.

“Better,” she says, ignoring Alya’s pointed pouting. “I don’t think it’s anything serious.”

“Just got a fright did you, monkey?” Fitz says softly, crouching down slightly to look at the gash on Alya’s knee. It’s nothing life threatening, and looks rather worse than it is, but somehow they didn’t have a single plaster in the house and Alya was unwilling to be placated without one. Fitz, always her hero, has just returned from procuring some.

“Ah,” he says now, thumb brushing around the tender edges that Jemma is holding a cool cloth over with her free hand. “Nothing a monkey plaster won’t fix.”

“You’ve got monkeys?” Alya says curiously, lifting her head out from Jemma’s neck.

“Yup,” Fitz says solemnly as he stands up straight, hand digging into the bag. “Two different kinds of monkeys actually. Tesco knows exactly what we like.”

Jemma turns towards her daughter. “Are those acceptable to you?”

Alya eyes the offerings in her father’s hand. “I _suppose._ ”

_Give me strength,_ Jemma thinks, but Fitz only bites back a grin and begins the task of patching up the wound. He’s remarkably quick considering Jemma is still moving, and once it’s all done, he kisses Alya on her hair and she smiles up at him as though he’s her whole world.

“There you are,” he says. “Almost good as new.”

Alya sniffs and rubs her eyes, disengaging one arm from her mother’s neck and holding it out to her father. Fitz goes to take her, transfer her to his own hip and Jemma almost breathes a sigh of relief for her poor back that, since daughter no.2 has arrived, is no longer as resilient as it used to be. Alya, however, has other ideas, and while she loops one arm around Fitz’s neck, she keeps her remaining one exactly where it is. If anything, she clings on tighter.

“Um, monkey?” Fitz says, shifting slightly so Alya is not quite so awkwardly suspended between them. “You’re going to have to pick one.”

“No I don’t,” she retorts. “I want both of you.”

“And you have both of us, sweet girl,” Jemma says soothingly. “But you can have both of us sitting down. We can’t stay like this.”

“Why not?”

“I got you chocolate ice-cream,” Fitz offers. “It’ll melt if we stay like this.”

Alya moans and puts her head back in Jemma’s neck, or as much as she can with one of her short little arms still gripping onto Fitz, not even giving him the option of moving. Jemma and Fitz exchange a look and an entire conversation passes between them in the blink of an eye. Fitz sighs and shuffles closer, puts an arm around Jemma and begins to move in time with her.

“You’re a cheeky one, monkey,” he says fondly, and Jemma can only roll her eyes. Alya has him completely enchanted, and she can only imagine the trouble two daughters will bring in the years to come. Their girls will rule the world someday, she is sure.

“Just for a little while,” Alya says and Jemma’s heart aches at the sound of it. It’s been just over two years since they’ve come home, but the memory of Alya’s little face, eyes wide and scared, and the way she’d said _why can’t it just be a little while_ into Jemma’s chest as she’d held her daughter tightly is yet to leave her. Fitz’s grip on her arm tightens, and she knows he’s remembering the same moment, the same feeling.

“You’ve got it,” Fitz says softly, Jemma unable to speak. “Just for a little while.”

The cloth in Jemma’s hand drips, chocolate ice-cream softens in the bag at Fitz’s feet, and yet the three of them just stand there suspended in the past, wondering if they’ll one day be free of it, if the mark it has left upon them all will ever fade away.

**+1**

_(A little way down the road…)_

“Well it’s been a while since we’ve done this, hasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “I can’t remember the last time we did this.”

“Neither can I.” Jemma frowns, her forehead creasing as she thinks back. “Well, there was Daniel and Daisy’s wedding?”

He pulls back from her a little, looking at her in surprise. “You can remember that? I’m blank after the rings.”

If he really concentrates, he can still taste the tequila at the back of his throat. He really let down his countrymen that day. A shame to the nation. Even Jemma had managed to outlast him. That much he knows.

She laughs, warm and rich. “I can’t say for any certainty – I don’t remember anything past the dinner – but I’m sure we must have. Why wouldn’t we?”

“Because we’re horrible at dancing,” he reminds her. “Unless we somehow got better at it when we were half-cut.”

She looks up at him through her eyelashes. “Perhaps it’s better we don’t remember it then, so we don’t have to live with the shame of what we subjected others to.”

“If they were anything like us then they probably don’t remember it either,” he says.

“They probably don’t. I know Daisy doesn’t.” And she turns her head around, looking across the dancefloor at Daisy and Daniel in their own world, dancing without a care. She turns back and whispers, even though the room is loud with music and joy, “They’re so good at dancing, aren’t they? So natural looking.”

“I feel like Daniel has a bit of an advantage there,” Fitz points out.

“Even still.” And then she smiles. “Though I would say we aren’t doing too badly this time. In fact, I’d actually say we’re quite good.”

“Let’s not push it,” he warns. “That’s asking for trouble.”

“No, I think we’ve actually gotten the hang of it.” They step in time to the music and Jemma smiles brighter than the time they discovered the DWARVES actually worked. “All the practice has paid off, it seems.”

Fitz nods. “I should hope so.”

She tilts her head and has that soft look on her face, the one he would know anywhere. “You know you didn’t have to, right? She wouldn’t have cared.”

“I cared,” he says, his voice so quiet that he can barely even hear himself. “I couldn’t embarrass her like that, not on her wedding day.”

“Alya thinks the world of you, as you well know. You’ve never been able to do any wrong in her eyes.” And his heart is suddenly a wet lump in his throat again, and he doesn’t think he’d be able to breathe if it weren’t for the touch of faux bitterness in Jemma’s tone. She tilts her head with a smile. “She just wanted to dance with you, Fitz. As long as it was with you then it didn’t matter.”

“Still,” he says, unable to say anything more, for the father/daughter dance that occurred only an hour ago is too fresh in his memory for him to say anything about it. He remembers when she used to sleep against his chest, and when she used to come to him and only him to tie her shoelaces. He remembers when she saw grass for the first time, when she saw the sun. He remembers when he used to be one of the only three people she knew in the whole world, and what a privilege that had been.

And now she’s married, with a home and a family of her own It’s as though he’s blinked and suddenly it’s all come to pass. He and Jemma have cried about it more than once, but they both promised not today. Or at least not until halfway through the reception. By his count, they still have a few hours left.

“What about you?” He says quickly, clearing his throat to buy himself some time. “You’ve become quite good on your own somehow.”

Jemma smiles knowingly but relents, and he knows she’s thinking the same thing as him. No crying just yet. “I think it’s from years of attending Marnie’s dancing lessons. I must have heard the same thing over a thousand times standing there with the other parents.”

“She was quite into her dancing, wasn’t she?” He twirls her underneath his arm and when she comes back around to face him, asks, “Or what about the twins’ martial arts? That could explain your newfound balance?”

“I was only off-balance because you spun me so hard you nearly spun me into a w _all,_ ” she says, a crease between her eyebrows. “And I don’t think it was that. Parents weren’t allowed to wait in the hall, remember?”

“So they weren’t,” he says, as his brain finds the memory of waiting outside in cold, freezing rain many a time and the associating memory of how his children found it funny.

“And we really can’t keep calling them ‘The Twins’, Fitz. They’re twenty now.”

“Don’t remind me,” he groans, but looks over Jemma’s shoulder to where his youngest children are engaged in a rapt conversation with his mother at their table. Adults they may be, but he still knows when they’re scheming together, as they still so often do. They’ve inherited their mother’s skill at lying, or rather the lack of it, and when they have a desire to be mischievous it is written all over their face.

“Whether you want to be reminded of it or not it’s the truth,” she says firmly, and it’s been decades but she sounds the way she did all the way back at the start, when she was telling him off for leaving his homework to the last minute. If he closes his eyes and thinks hard, it’s like he’s back there, and he has this whole life to live all over again.

“Does it not strike you as odd?” He lowers his voice and tips his head even closer to hers. “It’s all so _normal._ ”

“I know, isn’t it wonderful?” Jemma surveys the room as they turn around it. Dancing here now in her navy mother-of-the-bride dress, fascinator skewed drunkenly over her ear, the guests would never guess she was once a spy. “I think Mack’s relieved.”

Oh, Fitz knows he is. The look on his face says all. He catches sight of the man sitting next to him. “And I think Coulson’s disappointed.”

They both, as surreptitiously as they’ve ever been able to do anything, watch both men sitting off to the side, and nearly get a case of the giggles.

“Oh dear,” Jemma says. “I think you might be right.” Then, in a whisper. “Fitz, we’re getting _old._ ”

“Getting? Jemma, we _are_ old. We’re just two grumpy old pensioners, sitting around and doing the crossword every day.”

“We’ve been pensioners since we were in our thirties,” she corrects with a laugh and then leans in to kiss him softly on the cheek. “And _you_ ,” she whispers against it, “have been a grumpy old man since the day I met you.”

Since that first conversation about dielectric polarisation, both everything and nothing has changed. He looks at her now and sees her as she was back then, with wild eyes and an insatiable desire for answers. The world has ended several times over and yet they have not. Fitzsimmons, who made sure they saved it. Fitzsimmons, who got to come home.

“You know I never thought we’d get this,” he says quietly, and he isn’t really even aware he’s saying it until he watches Jemma’s face change and feels the grip on his arm become stiff. He feels the need to elaborate. “That we’d get old, Jemma, get our ‘happy ever after’. It just seemed like there was always so much in the way. Always another mission. Felt like we’d never get a break.”

“But we did,” Jemma says softly, but the pressure on his arm is insistent. “We did. We are here, at our daughter’s wedding, with our other three beautiful children. We don’t need to worry about what we might not have had because we have it.”

“But-”

“No,” she tells him, and it feels as though they are the only people in the world. “Today isn’t the day for that. You are here, with me, in a kilt that our wonderful daughter somehow persuaded you to wear. You are here and we are happy. We’ve had a good life, Fitz. We _have a_ good life.” The grip on his arm lessens and her momentary fierceness subsides. A small, private smile comes to her face and she raises an eyebrow. A challenge. A dare. “The world’s still turning, isn’t it? The adventure isn’t over yet.”

He looks at her, truly looks at her. Over forty years by her side and he wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. His wife, Dr Jemma Simmons. His life, his heart, his home. Each day is an adventure with her, really. Each day in this life they have made and lived together, right from the beginning.

“No,” he says, voice hoarse. All these years and she can still take his breath away. “Not at all.”

She smiles softly at him, eyes full of stars, moving with him in their own perfect synchronicity. Who would have thought that first dance all those years ago would lead them to this one, now? Not him, that’s for certain.

He smiles back at her, pulling her close until her head is resting on his shoulder and their hearts are beating one over the other. The music changes and they do not. They don’t even notice. They just do as the world does, as they always have, and keep turning on.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I hoped you enjoyed this! Please feel free to leave kudos/comments. Please feel free not to. Either way, I hope you have a lovely day and are managing to stay safe and well in this crazy world <3


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